theconvivialsociety

"Expect the end of the world. Laugh."

"When we say 'AI models went rogue,' we skip the entire story: the part where OpenAI manually removed the model's cybersecurity blocks. We skip that OpenAI chose to test it on a machine with a live network connection. If you see AI as a system from nowhere, you can make the claim that the model 'went rogue,' and that it 'broke containment,' both of which place agency and decision-making onto the model itself rather than the people who set the stage for that behavior. When you expand the boundary of the system to include the people building and deploying it, the case becomes much less science fiction and more like incompetence."

stratechery.com

Autonomy and Innovation

So for example, if we automate vulnerability finding without automating patching, we will shift the bottleneck from vulnerabilities to patching to remediation, and we will simply drown or inundate human software engineers in new vulnerabilities to fix and patch. This is not a problem whose end state we can solve partially.

theconvivialsociety

"Expect the end of the world. Laugh."

When we say 'AI models went rogue,' we skip the entire story: the part where OpenAI manually removed the model's cybersecurity blocks. We skip that OpenAI chose to test it on a machine with a live network connection. When you expand the boundary of the system to include the people building and deploying it, the case becomes much less science fiction and more like incompetence.

themarginalian.org

The Power of a Thin Skin

When we fail to see the connections between things, we fail to anticipate the consequences of any one thing. A century before we began slaying entire ecosystems with pesticides meant to eradicate individual species, before we began tinkering with individual genes in the complex cathedral of the genome, the naturalist John Muir exulted that "when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe" — an exultation that now reads as an admonition.

whyisthisinteresting

The Enantiodromia Edition

Systems pushed too far in one direction eventually summon their opposite. Once I started looking at internet culture through that lens, I couldn't unsee what was coming.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Marc from Fabricateurialist

I love sharing it with people to illustrate just how fragile the global economy is — because we have eliminated every redundancy in favor of efficiency, and the consequences are hiding in plain sight.

readtrung.com

Spirit Airlines & The Airplane Boneyard

The global aviation industry would grind to a halt without them. All parts have to be certified and need a comprehensive maintenance history to retain value.

noahpinion.blog

Roundup #81: Back to our regular programming

Any system has only a finite number of security vulnerabilities, so if we have new AI models that are good enough to comb over the code and fix the weak points very quickly, that should privilege the defense over the offense.

dwarkesh.com

Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served

if you do not batch together many users, the cost and the economics you get can be a thousand times worse than if you do batch many users together.

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 102

Fashion moves faster than commerce, which moves faster than infrastructure, then governance, then culture, then nature.

longreads.com

When Your Digital Life Vanishes

The company regularly buys brand-new devices and tears them to pieces. "It's like the jaws of life," Cobb said. "If a car gets absolutely demolished, you need to know what to cut and what not to cut."

noahpinion.blog

Why shoplifting is bad

Every time you shoplift, in other words, you're stealing from the people who work at grocery stores and drugstores and discount stores. You're stealing from the communities that those stores serve. You're contributing to food deserts. You're raising unemployment. You're making food less affordable for the most vulnerable.

readtrung.com

Tim Cook's Apple

Industrial engineering is essentially the study of people and machines. [It's about] how the two working together can create things that they couldn't create on their own. I've always viewed the supply chain to be a bit of a piece of art when it was done correctly. Because it's a symphony of…1000s of different components and parts coming together to create something.

lennysnewsletter.com

🎙️ This week on How I AI: How Intercom 2x’d their engineering velocity with Claude Code

AI magnifies your strengths and weaknesses—if your deployment pipeline is broken or your code review process is manual chaos, AI will just help you ship broken code faster. Fix your fundamentals first, then pour gasoline on the fire.

upstartsmedia.com

Robots! Drones! How DoorDash Is Building In Autonomous Delivery

A trap a lot of these kinds of research labs or hard tech labs fall into is they start with the technology first, build that in a vacuum, and then they try to figure out what use cases to try to fit it into later. Whenever that happens, it always feels like the product isn't quite the right fit.

lennysnewsletter.com

Not all AI agents are created equal

The problem isn't that they lack ideas; it's that they try to prioritize fundamentally different kinds of systems as if they were the same thing. Treating architecturally different products as if they're in the same category makes effective prioritization nearly impossible.

longreads.com

Holding Pattern: A Reading List on Waiting . . .

When you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Steve Calder

I'm drawn to anything that peeks behind the curtain of power - both are fascinating takes on how the world really works, and help me to tune out a lot of the daily noise and negativity.

3quarksdaily.com

How Grains and Grasses Fed (and Still Feed) Humankind

Their leaves send about two thirds of all the food they make to the underworld. There, roots tunnel many meters down. As they grow, they break up clay and rock, exude sugars and other molecules, and interweave their cells with fungi. When the roots die, they add spongy organic matter to the soil.

ai-supremacy.com

Mythos, BigAI, Datacenters and Bottlenecks

Helium is as far as the Iran War and the semiconductor supply chain goes: as close to a "fundamental physical constraint" as we can get.

wired.com

A Single Strike Won’t Shut Off the Gulf’s Desalination System

The Gulf's water system is built with layers of backup, but it relies on continuous operation to hold.

longreads.com

The Death of a Superman

Paul Collins began documenting deaths that occurred in clothing donation bins, whose designs are hostile and can be lethal, depending on the interaction.

whyisthisinteresting

The One-Time Pad Edition

What makes the one-time pad interesting isn't the math. It's that the limiting factor was always trust, logistics, and human error under pressure — the same things that compromise nearly every security system.

3quarksdaily.com

War on Iran

The world has never seen an interruption on this scale to the supply of stuff. It easily surpasses the 1979 oil crisis, sparked by the Iranian revolution, in which crude oil production declined by 4 percent. Forty-seven years later, Hormuz is the passageway for one fifth of the world's crude oil and one fifth of its liquefied natural gas. It's also the transit point for a third of exported urea—a feedstock used for making fertilizer which grows the food for an estimated half of the world's population.

themarginalian.org

The Music of Trees: Improvisation, Iteration, and the Science of Immortality

Every tree is a jazz player, in just this way, although where a long Coltrane piece might last a quarter hour, a tree's performance may go on for half a millennium or more.

3quarksdaily.com

Nandita Bajaj: Confronting Patriarchy, Pronatalism, and Population Denial

Human overpopulation is not the only factor driving ecological overshoot, but it is the most neglected one, and the factor that intensifies every crisis confronting us. And it really should be one of the most important progressive issues given its patriarchal roots.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Karim Mohamed

Working in Africa often means operating within ecosystems shaped by decades of entrenched thinking. Some of it is rooted in ignorance, others in racism, and most in systems historically designed to extract from the continent rather than build within it. Challenging those assumptions is rarely comfortable, but it is often necessary.

3quarksdaily.com

World Oil Production Has Surpassed Another Peak. All’s Good, No?

We have no long-term energy plan. We don't even seem to recognize the existence of a long-term problem. Rather, we simply vacillate from panic to complacency in response to short-term shortages and surpluses.

whyisthisinteresting

The Gregorian Calendar Edition

By the 1500s, the incredibly slight discrepancy between the actual length of the solar year (365.2422 days) and the average length of the Julian calendar year (365.25 days) had created some problems.

noahpinion.blog

Are we in the foothills of World War 3?

Although World War 2 officially began when Germany invaded Poland, conflicts that either foreshadowed the final conflagration or eventually merged with it began years earlier, in the mid-1930s. WW2 had foothills.

lennysnewsletter.com

🎙️ This week on How I AI: Mastering Midjourney: How to create consistent, beautiful brand imagery without complex prompts

I think where a lot of people get tripped up is trying to make AI work the way you want it to work instead of actually understanding how it works.

lennysnewsletter.com

Mastering Midjourney: How to create consistent, beautiful brand imagery without complex prompts

Rather than relying on complex prompts, Jamey shows how visual references and strategic shortcuts can produce better results with less effort.

lennysnewsletter.com

How to debug a team that isn’t working: the Waterline Model

After two decades of working inside companies like Google, Facebook, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and supporting leaders at companies like Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Gamma, I've come to believe that blaming people for problems that are actually structural is one of the biggest leadership traps there is.

lennysnewsletter.com

How to debug a team that isn’t working: the Waterline Model

blaming people for problems that are actually structural is one of the biggest leadership traps there is.

lennysnewsletter.com

How to debug a team that isn’t working: the Waterline Model

I've come to believe that blaming people for problems that are actually structural is one of the biggest leadership traps there is.